[T]his year’s most expensive Senate race between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown has boiled down to whether or not one of the candidates looks minority enough. “Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color,”Sen. Scott Brown charged in a recent debate. “And as you can see, she is not.” The charge led people to pore through Warren’s employment history, which then led Democrats to ask whether Brown thinks you can identify people’s ethnicity just by looking at them, which then led alleged Brown supporters to do a tomahawk chop mocking Warren, which then led to an apology demand from a Native American leader, which then led… you know, I’m just going to stop right there.

Scott Brown has been in the United States Senate for more than two years. For just as long, Elizabeth Warren has been a well-known “consumer advocate.” Neither is an unknown entity to the people of Massachusetts. So what is this back and forth all about? And what do these charges and countercharges possibly mean about their capacity to govern?

This, then, is the Honey Boo Boo campaign—mindless. A race in which the Republican, Mr. Brown, has spent millions trying to prove that he’s a better Democrat than the Democrat running to replace him.